


Equalty

by ryubyss



Series: Equalty [1]
Category: The Simpsons
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Gen, Politics, Satire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-23
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:14:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 10,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23285350
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ryubyss/pseuds/ryubyss
Summary: A political fantasy in which I make the Simpsons live in the real world and have bad things happen to them. I also try to predict the short term future... but, because of Covid-19, not a short term future will ever come to pass.
Series: Equalty [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1674610
Kudos: 1





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> I have put up the two complete parts of a work that I won't complete. The story begins in a version of November 2020 which, owing to the Covid-19 virus, we now know will never happen. So I will put up only the parts that I have already written "Equality" misspelled on purpose.

**Saturday morning, November — Boston Common**

Lisa Simpson lived in a nice house in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She had a good life, even though things got a little frenzied lately and a little desperate.

“Let’s go to the rally”, they had said. Father and mother and baby Marisol. So she went. Once, her father might have let her ride up on his shoulders in the yellow cellophane sunlight. Before he had gained a few pounds, before the bald patch had expanded any more than it had, he had decided to shave his head to camouflage the fact. The day had passed since his shoulders could hold her or she could fit. Barack, her younger brother, had stayed home. None could move him when he would not move. But Lisa wanted to help. Mom also went, which surprised her.

The Common had filled up. The number of people scared her. Lisa did not know why. They faced the rotunda with the Greek columns that formed a round stage. People would go up there and speak into a microphone or play music.

The voice came from the gazebo, with a hint of electrical crackle. The lady spoke into a mike and the voice went out of big speakers. The crowd moved forward, without knowing, towards the sound, like bacteria gathering at an open wound.

A woman had taken the stage, big both in the sense of tall and also wide and heavy. She reminded Lisa, for some reason, of a large refrigerator.

“Listen up!“, said the woman at the microphone. The voice came out with just a hint of electrical crackle. “I want to say a few words about what brought us all here…“

Lisa felt tense inside, right at the midpoint between her ribcage and chest. She didn’t know why. She always did at rallies.

"It's November. Beginning to get frosty in the air. Winter is coming to us all. It looks like, this year, spring will never come. Because we were hoping for spring, we were promised it, if we just worked hard enough, if we just voted. But it didn't come through. So we have to make our own spring. Not wait for it. That’s what I’m saying. Now a number of you been hibernating, hiding in your homes. That’s fine, that’s cool. Just as long as come out. Now, consider this a coming out party…”

The woman laughed at her own joke and bursts of laughter crackled through the crowd.

“Yeah, that’s a good one!“ The woman had begun to smile at last. “What I’m saying, we’re having to wake up, shake off the shackles of winter. All that winter, all that came before. I think it’s time we rose up. In fact… I’m sure it’s time to rise up. I _know_ it’s time to rise up. Like this.”

The woman held the microphone in her left hand. Her right she had balled into a fist, which she rose to the height of her shoulder. Then she lifted it above her head, as far as it would go.

“Now you,“ she said in a quiet voice. “ _Now you._ ”

A fist lifted in the crowd, then another. A row of fists, four or five. The hard tense membrane got stiffer. Lisa stared at the face of her mother, so blank and with watery unreadable eyes:. Out in the crowd, faces lifted away from their phones. Fists rose.

The voice came from the gazebo.

“Don’t be shy. Seriously. I wanna see those fists in the air.”

When the fists of her father and, shaking, her mother, rose into the air, Lisa lifted her fist, too. The small, soft tan fist of her infant Marisol did as well.

Lisa attributed this to coincidence.

**Flashback**

Lisa had never visited such a clean place as the clinic. It confused Lisa, because her mother loved color, loved creative disorder. Now she sat like a corpse in a simple room. The room had no color, not even white. An absence of definite color.

“How are you”, Lisa had asked, leaning forward. She could not read the answer on her mother’s face. She sat there in a gentle yet unnatural posture as if a doll sat in place carelessly by its owner.

Dad hovered by and did not know what to say. None of them did, not one of the three.

Lisa had just said what she had said, she thought, with shame, because characters in fiction, did. She put out her hand and touched her mother’s with it. At first Mom did nothing, she just sat, then she enclosed Lisa’s hand with her larger one. Lisa felt happy, then, or at least as happy as she could. Something like gray-black charcoal surrounded her heart, which made it hard to feel. They hugged, though Lisa’s mother did not hug back, like hugging a mannequin.

Mom pulled away and rubbed the bottom of her nose as if it had started to run. It hadn’t.

Lisa still felt like a little lost orphan girl, wandering around on the snow.

The world hadn’t ended, of course, Lisa knew. Only her part of the world. It had gotten a big jagged crack in it and underneath something grasping and formless.

Last Tuesday, a night etched now into Lisa’s memory, now and forevermore, they had sat together watching the election results on the 72 inch flatscreen, all save little Marisol, safely in bed. Barack had not paid attention, really. He had dressed, like Lisa, in his pajamas. He’d brought his phone and not looked up from it the whole time. Like he already knew what would happen, thought Lisa in retrospect.

Mom and Dad sat together under a big old comfy blankets, with mugs of coffee and watched CNN. Lisa had accepted the blanket out of politeness and then, when she thought that they no longer paid attention, shrugged it off her shoulders. As Lisa also watched, half at her parents and half at the screen, at no time absorbed in a device, she knew what would occur. Just as Barack, she suspected, also had known. Lisa thought later that he had only consented to it for the sake of seeing the expressions on his parents’ faces.

“Do you remember last election”, her father asked Lisa. He squeezed Lisa’s shoulder.

“No.” Lisa said, then corrected herself. “Mmm. A little?”

The election had happened four years ago. Half of Lisa’s lifetime ago. Lisa, four years old, had had little idea of anything. Lisa had grown up a lot since that time.

“It was a surprise to us, that’s for sure. A big surprise.”  
  
Dad snaked his hand behind Lisa’s back and gave her a little hug. She hugged back.  
  
“It was the worst thing that could have happened,” mom, said, flatly. She sipped her coffee. “We can only hope it doesn’t happen again.” The white coffee cup trembled in her hand.

When the election results came down. Lisa’s parents didn’t get visibly upset.  
  
Only, the Wednesday after the 2020 election, after election results had come in, Lisa’s had mother stayed in bed, even though she had to go to work. Dad had to feed her. She wouldn’t do anything.

The night before, when Lisa had gone to bed, unless she imagined it, Lisa had heard a brief but anguished cry. It sounded like the voice of a woman. The wordless plea had broken Lisa from her from sleep, Lisa thought, although for all she knew, she had dreamt it. Something as bad as that, she did not want to believe.

After school had ended, the teacher, Ms. Hoover took Lisa aside and said her father would come and pick her up, not the school bus. Lisa’s stomach plummeted like the car of an elevator with the cable cut. Her vision blurred over for a moment or two and she had an urge to cry. Then, to her enormous embarrassment, Lisa did begin to cry. The teacher guided her to the counselor’s office under a shielding hand, so that the other kids could not observe her tears, though Lisa suspected that they could, at least hear her sobs. She repressed the thought. She could not do anything about it and did not want to think about it.

Sitting in the counsellor’s office with a little square of window, she waited for her father to show up. So he did, and they spoke in the car. Barack sat in the back, Lisa in front. Barack kicked the seat in front of him. He always acted as if he didn’t care. Maybe he didn’t.

“Stop doing that,“ said her father. He didn’t look at Barack. Barack would know what he meant.

Mom and Dad considered Lisa the good child and Barack the bad one, to an extent that made her guilty. Also, pleased her. As if those two emotions could coexist. Lisa suspected that, yes, they could.

“Lisa, Barack…”

“Something bad has happened with mom.”

“Like Lisa said,” responded Barack. For once, Lisa and her brother had united. It wouldn’t last, probably.

“You kids are smart.”

Dad sounded as if he meant it.

“Ms. Hoover seemed kind of rattled, too,” said Lisa, and meant it, though she hadn’t properly noticed the fact until now.

“You’d think he was… you know…” Barack mumbled. “ _…Hitler._ ” He said the word, amongst in a whisper, just loud enough for Lisa, for her father to hear.

“Barack!”, said her father.

Lisa said nothing and just sat with her arms folded. Anything she might say would only encourage him.

“I’m very disappointed,” said their father. He turned on NPR.

No one had anything to say. Then Barack leaned over, mouth cupped over hand, as their father at the steering wheel stared out at nothing.

“I heard a teacher crying,“ Lisa's brother whispered to her. He sounded elated. “Behind a door.“

**Flashback**

“A recount,” said Lisa’s mother. Or maybe a kind of puppet said, that looked like her. “We can have a recount.”

Dad pulled over a chair and sat in it. He blinked but otherwise did not move. He did know what to do. He had, without thinking, put out his legs in a V. Dad engaged in manspreading and couldn’t help it. He would do it and have it pointed out to him, still do it. Dad, who would never change. It seemed to Lisa that no one ever changed in her family except herself. Unless you counted Barack, who just got worse and worse.

“I don’t know if they’ll be a recount,” said her dad. 

“Fine, but I’ll be out of here soon,“ said Mom, as if saying that proved something. Mom did get out of the clinic by the end of the night, though Lisa thought mom would have liked to have stayed for the next four years. Or until impeachment. Or until the death of the President.

**The rally**

At last the speakers had stopped speaking. After that, a band played at the gazebo with acoustic guitars, in Spanish. And then they sang “We Shall Overcome”. After that, they went home.

**Back home**

“How was it?”, asked Mom. She sat at the kitchen table with a tall glass of grapefruit juice in front of her. Lisa stared mesmerized at the pinkish red shadow cast by the liquid through the glass.

Lisa stood there, mute. Until her mother stood and clasped her about the shoulders and hugged her.

Dad had entered the room. Or perhaps he had already a few minutes ago and Lisa had failed to notice, until she glanced over her shoulder. The hug lasted a bit too long and had it a lot of stiff desperation. Desperate for what, Lisa didn’t know. She felt the eyes of Dad on her. He did tend to hover.

Lisa and her mother relinquished each other at the same time. So… Lisa dreaded dinner. She would go upstairs and reading more of _A Wrinkle in Time_. Tomorrow, she would to go to school and face other challenges different from today’s. For now, her book.

The world had a great ragged fracture in it but she did have books.

**Dinner**

Mom had made lasagna. Two portions of lasagna, in fact, one vegetarian (for Lisa) and the other with meat. Aside from that, salad and garlic bread. She bit into a slice. So perfect. Chewy _and_ crunchy. Books and garlic bread. They made life better.

“Thank you, Mom“, said Lisa.

“Oh, Homer helped”, Mom said.Lisa would not have sworn that he had. Dad probably would have stood around and talked while Mom did the work.  
  
“So how was the rally?“, asked Mom.

“It was good, okay,” Lisa said like a robot or a parrot or like… a robot parrot? She replied without looking at her mother and had another bite of garlic bread.

Dad spoke up. 

“I remember when little Lisa would ride on my shoulders. Do you remember doing that?”

“Oh course I do, dad. Of course I do.”

Dad must have had a stronger back then, as well as more hair.

“What are you studying in school?,” Mom asked, of Barack _and_ Lisa. Both. Lisa tensed up. Her brother always had the potential and will to disrupt.

“Nazi Germany,” Barack said.

Mom stared around blankly for a half second. Barack hadn’t lied but Lisa still tapped her brother’s foot. _Shut up, Barack._

Mom dropped her fork. The clink-clank of metal and porcelain.

“Nazi Germany?”, asked their mother, as if she had never heard the phrase before.

“It’s propaganda,” Barack said simply, quietly. All the sound went out of the dining area.

Dad stood up suddenly and moved next to his son. For a moment, lurching and vertiginous, she thought he would hit him. Except he did not hit him.

“Go to your room,“ said Dad in a quietly deadly voice. “Hand over your phone first.”

Barack scooped up both of his plates, then took out his phone and put it on the table. He headed up the stairs.

Mom stared fixedly ahead at nothing at all. Her face had the exact look of a weeping mask worn in a Greek tragedy. Petrified, not crying but doing nothing. Then her face, symmetrical before, shifted to the right, as if chewing taffy. It looked so awful. Her face looked awful.

Lisa hugged her. She didn’t know what else she could do.

“It’s all right, Lisa. It’ll be all right. I know you’re upset and…”

“Mom…”

“It’ll be the worst for you, growing up in these times.”

 _Why did I?_ , thought Lisa. _“No politics.”_ Like a prohibition in a folk tale you should never ever break. Only bad things would happen if you did. Now it had. She didn’t blame Barack. If he hadn’t done it, she would have.

They hugged once more in a perfunctory way and then let go.

“It’s awful“, said her mother. That seemed to describe everything, all the world.  
  
“It certainly is,” said Lisa. She didn’t know what else she could say. “We’ll uh, we’ll get through it.”

“Are you studying Nazi Germany, too?“

Lisa stood frozen and did not know what to say. You couldn’t divide by zero. You couldn’t think up a way to get out of this one.

“Mom…”

Lisa and her mom did not talk about it. Instead, they finished up the dishes. She wondered what conversation her father would have with her brother. She decided she did not want to know.

Later, Lisa brushed her teeth, changed into pajamas and settled down to bed. She picked up the book again. They had just gone to the planet Camazotz. What a silly name. She _loved_ the silly name. Just like she expected _A Wrinkle in Time_ would have a happy ending, she figured that all of this, everything going on would have one. Hoped that, anyway.

 _But the world has broken_ , whispered part of her brain. _The world has broken._

 _But it hasn’t_ , Lisa answered back to that part. Her mother thought that. She did not have to think that. No…

Lisa found herself crying a little, silently and without a lot of fuss.

**That night**

Lisa had turned the light off. She had blanket drawn over here and now she settled down to sleep. If she could think of sleep and not of tomorrow, when she would have to face this world again, then she could sleep.

She did not tell her mother or father that sometimes she couldn’t. The Simpson family had one broken mother and possibly one broken son in it and she did not want to imbalance things any more. It felt illegal.

When, at last, she had reached the borders of sleep (for, on this night, by good fortune, she found the borders to sleep approachable, unguarded) she became aware of a shivery voice, of the kind of a white moth might have, if it had the power of speech.

“Lisa…”

And then, when she thought it had given up, hoped it had, the voice spoke a second time, more insistent. A part of her recognized that this voice had spoken to her for a long time.

“ _Lisa…_ ”

She grunted, like her father did sometimes, and roiled her blanket without flinging it off of her.

“Mmmm…”

A unformed sound stole out of Lisa, that maybe sounded just like a noise and maybe just like a question.

“Lisa, I’m here. I’m your friend. I knew that you were lonely, so I came to visit you. It’s good to have gotten here so that I could see you. It’s really good, you know.”

She reached for the bedside lamp, so as to turn it on.

 _Oh, yes,_ she thought. _The emotion that I feel right now. Fear._

Normal, honest, fear. Not just the formless unease she had gotten used to.

“No!," said the voice. "Don’t turn on the light. I have a few things to tell you before then and I really would not want you to get…“

“Scared?”

“Yes, that’s right. _Scared._ I wouldn’t want you to get scared. You might get scared if I turned on the light. I don’t look like you would expect.“

What _would_ Lisa expect? The voice sounded like the voice of a girl, around Lisa's age, but hollow in a way. _The glass harmonica._ Lisa had heard the phrase. It did not mean what it sounded like, meaning, a harmonica made of glass, but when you set up glasses on a table. You played a trick with them using water. You could make the glasses sing with ethereal voices.

“In fact, please, don’t try to look at me in the dark.“

“Why not?”

“For the reason that I gave.”  
  
“For now?”, Lisa asked. It surprised Lisa that her own voice had a sliver of hope in it. She had thought she had used it all up.

“Yes,” agreed the voice. “For now. Please look away for now.“

So Lisa looked away, before her eyes had adjusted to the dark of her room. Instead, she gazed out through her window, with the palm of her hand put underneath her cheek.

Lisa could only see through her bedroom window an edge of the moon under a lot of cotton wool clouds.

“I guess I’ll know in the morning.”

Lisa said that this both to herself and to the voice.

“Yes," responded the voice. "You will.”

“What’s your name?“

“Glimpse."

“Glimpse?”

Lisa heard the girl nod, or imagined that she did, and repeated herself. 

“Glimpse.”

 **Dawn**

Lisa woke at once, without post-waking confusion, yet also refreshed in both body and mind. The bedroom in which Lisa lay, in her bed half under sheets, half free of them, had filled pellucid oyster gray light.

Eyes opened, Lisa turned to look from the window to her room and saw that her friend, Glimpse, had not lied. As Glimpse had said, she had never seen nor even imagined such a person before.

Lisa Simpson balled up both fists and pressed them to her mouth, so that she wouldn’t scream.


	2. Chapter One: "Rebellion"

**EQUALTY**

**_Chapter One_ :** “Rebellion”

**Lisa’s bedroom**

The gray dawn light changed to pink light which, by degrees, grew brighter. Lisa’s new friend, Glimpse sat in Lisa's chair. Lisa stared at Glimpse in awe and (and this surprised Lisa) gratitude. Because Lisa had a new friend.

Glimpse wore an old fashioned party dress, with a bow, she fancied, tied up in the back. White silk stockings and silk, as if her (Glimpse’s, not Lisa’s) parents had plans to take her to a fancy party. ( _If_ , thought Lis, _Glimpse even has parents._ ) She appeared like an ordinary girl — of Lisa’s exact age — with hair bound up symmetrically in an old-fashioned style, in two bunches behind her transparent ears. Glimpse’s flesh, if you could call it that, resembled gray or silver-tinted clear glass. The dark silhouette of her bones showed clearly through.

“See, I’m not really that frightening, now am I?”

Glimpse had the perky high-pitched voice of a character out of an old black and white cartoon.

“Are you real?“, asked Lisa.

Glimpse laughed the most perfect laugh that Lisa had ever heard, composed of tinkly silver bells and silence.

“Are you?“, Glimpse responded.  
  
Lisa tilted her head and mused. Already, she had started to like Glimpse. Who else ever asked Lisa difficult questions? She tried to think over the problem. What made her, Lisa, real? Lisa thought she thought. Lisa _knew_ she felt. What else?

“Yes… no?”

Lisa answered in confusion.

The skeleton girl laughed again, with her, not at her. After a few moments, Lisa joined in.

The door rapped once, then twice.

“Lisa!”, said the voice of her father, from the other side of the door. Lisa made frantic _hide! hide!_ motions at her friend. _Bury yourself under the blankets, go in the closet! Hide!_ Lisa knew better than to _say_ anything. Glimpse did not move. Maybe she did not understand.  
  
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!”, Lisa called. She couldn’t help but giggle, a little, at the same time that she felt guilty for waking up her father.

Glimpse started to speak so Lisa ran over to clasp her hand over her friend’s lips. The flesh, when she touched it, had the same cool slick texture Lisa expected.

“We’ll be quiet!”  
  
“Oh,” dad laughed. “You have an imaginary friend.”  
  
“But I’m not… she’s not…”

“I’m sure she’s very real,” her father said. “But please, could the two of you please be a little quieter, for the sake of your parents?”

“Oh, dad…”, Lisa groaned.  
  
“Thank you, Lisa.”

Her father left. She could hear him leaving.

Lisa’s parents loved her. She knew that. Lisa knew that so much that it hurt sometimes to think about, because not everybody had it so good. Lisa only then remembered Glimpse. Their eyes met. Lisa’s mouth opened. She wanted to apologize to Glimpse for what her father had said.

“No!”, said Lisa’s new friend. “I am, for all intents and purposes, unreal. He cannot see me or hear me. Neither can your mother.“  
  
“And Barack?”

Glimpse laughed.

“I don’t know that your brother notices anything at all, beside himself.”  
  
Lisa pondered this. It sounded wise. Perceptive. She, Lisa, lay in her bed, looking at Glimpse.

“You knew I was lonely,” Lisa said. It came out awed.

Glimpse nodded slowly, sadly.

“I did.”

Lisa got off the bed and looked at Glimpse.

"Are you are alien?" 

“No, Lisa. In fact I don’t know exactly what you mean when you say that. What does it mean?”

“Oh, it doesn’t matter. Are you a ghost?”

“Hmmm. I might be. Would I know if I were? I don’t think I have lived a life before this one, though, and all ghosts have. The lives they lived before they died, I mean.”

Lisa regretted having asked those questions. She had not asked the main one, the only one that really mattered.

“Are you really what you said, my friend? My friend and nothing else?”

“I think so. ”

“Then let’s be friends, Glimpse.”

“We will be.” Glimpse’s smiled, with her transparent lips. Perfect small white teeth. “We already are.”

“Where can you sleep? Do you _need_ to sleep?”

“I have a place of my own where I live, Lisa. If you like, though, I can come and visit you any time.”

“Any time?”

Glimpse nodded. “Even at school. It’s not as if anyone else will notice.”  
  
“Well, I think I have to go breakfast. I think they’ll start wondering if I’ve gone too long.”  
  
“You can just tell them you were talking with your imaginary friend. But… don’t call me ‘imaginary’. They’ll get suspicious.”

Glimpse knew how her family worked. How people worked. Lisa would have told Glimpse that, but Glimpse had gone. She had gone away to wherever she had come in the first place. Not like a movie, where you see it happening, just one blink of an eye later, no Glimpse.

Lisa’s stomach sank. She would have to live through breakfast, all the boring everyday things, alone. Why hadn’t she asked Glimpse to stay?

**Barack’s bedroom — the night before**

Barack lay on his bed. He had turned out the lights. He heard a rap, then a second. If he did answer the door before the third knock then his father would get angry. His father had Barack’s phone.

“Barack…”

When Barack opened the door for his father. Dad father looked around the darkened room and turned on the light without asking. Barack winced at the brightness.

“What were you doing here?”  
  
“Nothing.”

Barack had told the truth. The literal truth. Nothing. Barack had, after he had finished the remnants of his meal, done nothing. Without his phone, many wide avenues of possibility opened themselves to him, to north, to south, too east and to west. Only, empty avenues. Except if he had no phone. He did not know what to do without it, again, in the literal sense.

“Barack, we have to talk.”

“We’re talking.“

“Don’t be like that,” said Barack’s father.

 _Except,_ thought Barack. _How can I not act like myself? Ten years old and a wiseass, a troublemaker. How do you trade in this personality for a different one? You couldn’t._

“Uh, dad…”  
  
“Just try. Try. I had to pick your mother up from the facility. It was a sad place. She was sad. She was very sad and she hasn’t gotten less sad. Do you have to make her worse?”

Barack let his head fall. Hot stinging tears had opened up at the corner of his eyes. _I have hurt my mother._ He kept on thinking that, in a loop. _I have hurt my mother…_

Barack had curled up, on his bed. A prize fighter beaten up on too many times. He couldn’t leave the ring, though, and the referee wouldn’t end the bout.

His father leaned over.. He placed one tentative hand on his son’s shoulder. Barack shirked from his father's touch. He flinched away. Barack hurt already and it hurt more that his father touched him. Except he couldn’t do anything about it.

One thing, Barack told himself, he wouldn’t do. He wouldn’t cry.

“Barack…”

Barack shuddered and drew away. He wouldn’t cry.

“I tried… I tried to tell her about..."   
  
Barack had resorted to a lie. He knew that he lied, even if he technically told the truth. It could get him out of this trouble. Barack went on.

”They said that they’d mail something from school. That's why I mentioned Hitler."   
  
“What?”, asked his father in a flat voice, though Barack thought that probably he should sound sympathetic and not just _there_.

“You can look,” Barack said in a choked voice. He hadn’t meant to overact. Actually, he hadn’t meant to put on an act at all. Barack guessed he must really feel… however he felt. He couldn’t put a name to the feeling.

Technically, Barack hadn’t lied at all. 

**Later, in the kitchen**

Homer Simpson went through the blue recycling bin. Junk mail, other junk mail, an empty can of Trader Joe’s chick peas. Also, to Homer’s wondrous surprise, pieces of paper on which his infant daughter had made loops and hills and valleys, a wax crayons held in her fat little fist. Homer plucked that out and put it on the kitchen top. He wanted to save that, not throw them out.

 _Nothing._ He frowned. If his son had lied…

Until then, he saw it, lying on a table with some bills. A pamphlet from the school, addressed to them, the elder Simpsons. The parents.

 _Confronting History, Confronting Ourselves,_ read the headline. Two pairs of two letters each, with the first letter a different color than the second one.Below that, _A City-Wide Program of Reflection and Remembrance_.

The front, and the inside of the glossy pamphlet (it opened up, gatefold style) showed a montage of the Warsaw Ghetto, a 1950s diner (“No Coloreds”) and black protestors sitting down there in protest of the sign. Also, a beer-bellied man with sunglasses, yelling. The last one looked recent. Probably the man yelled something about Muslims or immigrants or “the homosexuals".

But none of this affected Homer in the same way as the shattering and undeniable truth which came to him, that he had misjudged his one and only son. _Oh_ , thought Homer. _What have I done to Barack?_

Homer stood with the pamphlet in one hand then, a few minutes later, knocked on the door of his son’s bedroom. He had Barack’s phone in his pocket.

“Come in,” answered Barack’s defeated sigh from behind the door. Barack still lay on the bed. “Here you are,” said Barack’s father. “I guess I messed up?”

Barack shrugged in a sad way.

“I guess you did.”

His father looked sad.

“We’re all going through tough times.”

He took the phone.

“Barack?”  
  
Barack made a sound, not exactly a “yes” or “uh” or “huh”, just a sound to show you he had heard, that had a single syllable.

“Don’t talk about this with your mother.”

“I won’t.”

Barack sounded certain about it. Once he had registered this, Barack’s father stood and without a word, left the bedroom. He did not know what else, if anything, that they had to discuss.

**Back to the present**

Breakfast went okay. Surprisingly. Lisa got through it the way she did now, by spooning up her cereal and saying naught except when prompted. No one else spoke except in the most mechanical way.

As for Glimpse, she had not returned.

Lisa and her mother cleaned up breakfast together. A gender-stereotypical thing to do, but Lisa still liked to do that with her mother. It made both of them seem normal. Having something to do… Daughter-mother time. They rubbed moisture off the plates and things with dish towels, hardly a word having passed between them. Then Lisa had a question.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

Mom had on a half-smile.

“Can I go use my iPad?”

“Of course you can.“

Technically, Lisa did not have to even ask, because mom knew that Lisa did not have a problem with mobile devices. (Dad did not care.) Still, Lisa liked to ask anyway. It _made sense_.

Lisa sat now curled up in an irregularly shaped patch of sunlight on a cushion downstairs. Snowball II, a small, not particularly pretty black cat who Lisa loved dearly, sat beside her. The sunlight made the cat’s matte black cat’s fur turn brown when it touched it. Lisa did not know if she could live without Snowball II. Just like, Lisa had to think, that her parents loved her. Only more so, in the case of her parents.

_Imaginary friends, imaginary friends…_

The research that Lisa could dig up seemed to say that making up imaginary friends helped real children to model social relationships. Spending time with pretend people could help you get along with real people, through practice. Also, imaginary friends fell into various categories. Some looked like ordinary kids (only, not real) others like animals or goblins or fairies. Others looked just plain strange, but not strange in the same way as Glimpse, no. More like astronauts. Or tubes of toothpaste which could talk. Not _really_ strange, though, like Glimpse.

Lisa put away the iPad.  
  
Did that make Lisa crazy? Or did that make Glimpse maybe… real? Lisa had to admit that made her feel a little bit scared.

Now here came Glimpse herself. Lisa maybe just hadn’t noticed her or maybe Glimpse had come back from the mysterious place from which she had come. She sidled over and stroked Snowball II, who stretched out and smiled and purred.

“Snowball likes that!”

“Is that her name? She is a cute cat!”  
  
“She is. She’s a _very_ cute cat.”  
  
Lisa hoped she did not look guilty. After all, she’d just done as thorough an investigation of her new friend as she could. If she did not glance at the iPad screen, well, maybe Glimpse wouldn’t notice.  
  
“Where, um, were you?“

“Oh, creeping about. I was looking around upstairs.”

“Glimpse, I really don’t think…”

Lisa thought to lower her voice a fraction. She did not want to sound crazy.

Glimpse just sounded fine with whatever.

“I didn’t go into the room of you mother and father if that’s what you were meaning.” (Glimpse lowered her voice, in a conspiratorial manner.) ”I _did_ go into your brother’s room.”

“But that’s… Really?”  
  
Lisa understood and accepted. It would have seemed wrong to intrude on mom and dad’s privacy. Everyone knew that rule wouldn’t apply to her brother. You just _knew_ so.

“Yes. Your brother was looking at a... kind of screen.”

“Tell me more,“ said Lisa, with narrowed eyes.

“Oh, he _watched_ the screen. Men and women, mostly men. Mostly just one man. A tall, thin man. Distinguished. Oh he looked like a professor or something. Sometimes he had a beard and other times not, most always in a nice suit.”

“He looked like a professor?”

“Yes. A learnéd man.”  
  
“Did this man say anything about lobsters?”

Glimpse put a hand underneath her chin and thought a full minute or more, or so it seemed to Lisa.

“Yes,” she answered finally. “I think that he did.”  
  
 _Lobsters_ , thought Lisa fiercely, her brow knit up. _Nasty, snappy creatures. Eating garbage. Dwelling in the dark._

**Lisa’s bedroom**

Lisa lay on her bed, on her back, sometimes with eyes open, sometimes with eyes furiously shut. _I won’t confront him, I won’t confront him,_ her mind repeated, like a derailed train about to burst explosively off a cliff. She thrust herself off the mattress and pounded the pillows.

Glimpse had not disappeared but fretted uselessly in her general vicinity. Even imaginary friends (or whatever you could call Glimpse) must have moments of uncertainty and doubt.

Lisa let loose a wordless tortured cry into her pillow. Her mind subsided, finally, after, what seemed to Lisa a long time. Did you call something like this more of a tantrum or something more adult?  
  
She lay, a rag doll for all intents and purposes, with the salty tracks of tears down her eyes. Spent. Exhausted. She did not want to go back to her book now. She did not know what she wanted to do. At all.

Either Glimpse initiated the hug or Lisa gave it. Regardless, they sank into each other’s arms with eyes closed, grateful for each other’s company. When Lisa opened her eyes, Glimpse had gone. For the best, she thought, wiping her red and tired eyes. She did not know what to say, anyway.

Lisa wondered, having no evidence to make up her mind either way, if Barack struggled to rise above this madness or if his head had slipped under or if had begun to drown, with no hope of rescue, ever.

 _If anyone does try to rescue him,_ she thought. _It will come down to me. Me, just me. Only me. My mother can’t do it, at least not right now, maybe other. My father… I don’t he ever could. It has to come down to me._  
  
If it came down to anyone. Lisa did not know if she trusted herself not to screw this up.

She punched a cushion, so forcefully so that she scooped it up, cradled it and apologized.

**That night**

Barack had slipped out of the house, no problem. He would create chaos now. Barack had loved chaos, he loved, once upon a time, to have the world pivot around him and dance to his tune. Except then, when he had discovered Jordan Peterson, he had a more nuanced view.  
  
Jordan Peterson, said his haters, revered Order and abominated Chaos, but no… Peterson approved of Chaos, in the right place, in the right measure, in the right time. So now, here, he felt that Jordan Peterson would approve.

Slipping through the streets, hugging to the shadows, cold beneath his layers of black clothes in the cold, dark November night. He wore black Converse with white detailing, the latter drawn over by judicious use of a black Sharpie.

Now he had reached his school. He took out a can of white spray paint, with a dent in it. Barack couldn’t have obtained it, because of his age, but he could, and had, taken it from the number of unused of half-used tools lying around the garage.

He shook the can meditatively. What should he write or draw? Of course he _could_ write down something dumb and obvious, like _It’s OK to Be White_. He knew he could break apart the world more simply than that, by presenting a more minimal frame than that and allowing the opposition, the tyrants, to fill it with their own horrors. As limited and crippled imaginations as they had, it did not seem to apply when it came to fear.

Seven letters, he wrote. A single word. Barack smiled all the while as he did so.

**The next morning**

“Are you coming with me?”, asked Lisa. Around a day after Glimpse had first appeared in her life and already, she felt as much a part of her life as Snowball II or Santa’s Little Helper. So strange and yet so _right_ to have a friend.

“I may later.”

“Okay,” said Lisa. More disappointment than even she knew she had made itself plain in her voice.

She ran downstairs, ate her usual hurried breakfast and got in the bus. Barack. The school bus pulled up. A police had pulled up too, earlier, in front of the school. Principal Skinner and a lady cop and a man cop and a middle-aged man wearing a puffy jacket over a business suit, stood in front of… something. A white sheet covered something on the wall.

Lisa’s stomach clenched, like the protective mechanism of a mollusk (different from a crustacean). She glanced at her brother, on the right side (Lisa sat on the left) several rows ahead to see if anything showed on his face or in his eyes. Barack’s face had become a mask. She had never seen it so immobile. It looked like the face of a kid determined not to betray anything. The face of an outlaw.  
  
She glared at him but he either did not notice or pretended not to notice. He did not, at any rate, meet her eye.

**A few minutes later**

Instead of going into class, the students stood around, in groups according to their ages, and waited in the cold air, for the school to open. After half an hour, standing around, standing around, stamping their foot and fidgeting. After that, they all filed back into the school.

“Class will be a little different today”, said Ms. Hoover. She didn’t sound pleased about it. “Actually, it won’t be a normal class at all.”

She looked at her students and, Lisa thought, really saw them. Ms. Hoover, Lisa imagined, did not like what she would do next.

“The principal asked us all to do this.”

 _”Don’t blame me for this”,_ thought Lisa. Ms. Hoover really meant to say _that_.

Ms. Hoover continued. “I would like you all to place your hands on the desk and put your head on the desk and think. Like this…” She mimicked the pasture that she expected her students to adopt.

“But Ms. Hoover...“ came a voice. Thin, plaintive. Also confused.

“As I said,“ she went on. “The Principal has asked us to do this to you…” She stopped. “…I mean, asked us to ask you to do this.” She paused for emphasis. “Now, one member of the school community… we suspect… has acted against the ideals of the school. I would like you all to close your eyes and think about that, and what that means. Also, who might have done this. Or if you yourself participated in this… act. If you have, please get up and speak with me. Even if you don’t know and only have a good idea.”  
  
She stood up and looked at them, every one of them, in the eyes.

“Now, please begin.”

One by one, with degrees of reluctance and disobedience, the students laid their heads on their desks. All of them, as far as far as Lisa could tell. _Collective punishment_ , thought Lisa, cooly and distantly. _They’ve never done that before._ She told herself that she could just meditate, just wait it out. Until the thought reared up and take her, like a cobra out of a pit.

 _You know what you must do_ , said the traitor thought. _You know who did it. You know what you must do._

Bad thoughts she could ignore but this one? Her feet moved around on the floor, like her legs wanted to dance without the rest of her.

 _You know what you must do._  
  
 _But I don’t know if he did it,_ said Lisa to the thought. _He may not have, I mean other troublemakers go to this school. Even whoever did it even went to the school._  
  
 _But you know who did it,_ answered back the voice. _Don’t you?_

She did.

If Lisa said that she merely _suspected_ and did not know that her brother had done it, she would not lie. Her faith adjured right speech, which meant, more or less, true speech. _No lying._ It would not count as lying. Also, to withhold true speech…

 _I won’t,_ thought Lisa. _I won’t fink on my brother. Even if it means going against Buddhism._

**Barack’s classroom — A few minutes before**

A boy chuckled.

“Snitches get stitches.”

Another laugh. It rippled through the classroom. Another student said something under her breath which Barack couldn’t make out. That provoked another small trickle of laughter. The teacher put up with that for all of five seconds.

“Quiet! Please. Heads on the desk.”

Barack closed his eyes and dropped his head. He did bother to erase the smirk from his face, though. Why do that?

After he had closed his eyes for a minute, two minutes maybe, the smirk had vanished off of his face anyway. He had got to thinking. Barack had specifically got to thinking about his sister and how she would have, at least, _suspected_ him of the crime. Krabappel had not asked for certain knowledge, had she? She had only said, tell me if you know. Or think you know.

Lisa the Buddhist. Buddhists disdained lies. Lisa the idealist. Lisa the goodhearted and pure. Barack had a good idea of what his sister might do or might have done already. Smirking? No. If he wouldn’t speak up they might get to him through her. Lisa would break more easily than Barack.

At last it occurred to him, and it seemed so obvious, that he should not, should never feel any shame. Jordan Peterson would not want him to feel shame. Not for this, not for speaking the truth, even if it entailed the breaking of laws. Tyrannies did not have laws, really, only the rule of power. The rule of force.

Barack stood up before his mind registered the instinct, with his hand put up. The teacher’s eyes flicked to meet his and met contact with his. She gave him a look. She knew what he meant.

He walked over to the teacher's desk.

Barack turned to look at the others. His followers and admirers. Most of the students had heard him stand, even if Barack had not spoken. They had little smiles of their own or just look confused or just looked blank. _Why would Barack give himself up?_ , he thought. They thought that they knew him and everything about him.

The teacher nodded at him. Barack knew what he must do and she knew that he knew. So she left him to do it.

 _The rule of power_ , Barack thought, after the door had shut behind him. _I do not believe in that any more. Not as a way to live my life._ He hoped to reach for that high goal, if he could reach that far. 

**The Principal’s office**

“Have you anything to say in your own defense?”

Principal Skinner sounded bored. Barack, in a way, felt bored, too. After, he had gone through these rituals so many times. It never changed, did it?

“Yes, yeah, but…”, Barack started to say, then stopped.

 _You wouldn’t hear it_ , Barack thought. I could say the words but they’d bounce off him like raindrops off of a battleship. So Barack wouldn’t bother.

“I suppose you think you’re making a political statement,” the principal said.

“Maybe I am,” Barack mumbled. He hadn’t wanted to say anything. He couldn’t stop himself.

“Either way, you’re in trouble.”

Barack shrugged. He did not have to playact not caring any more, since they really didn’t.

“You will sit outside until I’ve phoned your parents. If they can’t pick you up, you’ll just have to wait.”

“How long?”  
  
“Until the end of the day.”

 _Six and a half hours_ , Barack thought. _All that time, doing literally nothing. Unless one of them rescued me. But they had jobs. They wouldn’t. Six and a half hours._

Barack made a noise, not even a word, really, and, with a look, sent something halfway between accusatory glare and a plea for clemency.

”Sit and wait. If you get up and run it will be worse on you.”

Barack had nothing to say to that, or do in response to that, at all. He felt tired and empty. _Actually_ , Barack thought, _I always do. Just most of the time I can pretend._ It did not normally feel this unavoidable.

For the next six and a half hours, Barack sat, moving quite a lot, actually. You never notice how much you move until you get in a situation where someone tells you not to do it. Foot shuffling, shifting in his seat. He had only a limited repertoire of motion, a small vocabulary. He could lean back in his seat. Slump. Sigh. Hate. Despair. Agony. As doomed and full of fatalism, say, as an experimental test animal awaiting some really fucking evil experiment. Lisa thought about that sort of thing, not Barack. Suffering mattered to Lisa. Human suffering, animal suffering. Injustice. Now Barack could not ignore his own. His suffering, the injustice done to him.

Out beyond the vestigial hall, Barack heard the voice of his father. and then a few squirmy minutes later, his father loomed over Barack and then the car ride he dreaded began, all too soon.

 _I thought I had it bad before_ , thought Barack. _I had known nothing._

**In the car**

“You know this is a bad time for this”, said his father. It sounded flat, unemotional and reasonable. Wiser than Barack would have thought possible. Barack did not say anything. He just sat there confused.

“Why so silent?”

Barack sat there and wished he had the _12 Rules for Life_ audiobook or a podcast with Jordan Peterson as the guest or a lecture. Any way of hearing Jordan Peterson’s voice, to listen to his wisdom. Barack lacked any of those things. So Barack stared at his father, until he began to cry. Hot tears. Big sobs, raking at him from the inside and forcing their way outward.

A few minutes passed until Barack could even think. The car had stopped, outside their house. His father looked at him but Barack did not know if he truly saw him.

Barack snorfeled and wiped tears from his eyes or snot from his nose, maybe both in a single inelegant motion. _Now,_ he thought, _he doesn’t know what to do._ In the midst of his tears, Barack felt, for some reason, comforted by the fact.

**Family dinner**

A chilly invisible mist enclosed the dining room. Lisa noticed it. She wouldn’t ask Glimpse if she (why look crazy if you could avoid it?) but Lisa sensed that Glimpse did. The room’s lighting had done down. Glimpse occupied one of the extra chairs, reserved for guests. She sat next to Lisa, of course.

When their mother spoke, she did so with a goblet of red wine in cradled in both hands. She rarely ever drank, at least, as far as Lisa could tell, in the home.

“I know,” she said, “that right now we’re all going through a tough time. ’S not easy for any of us.“

She had the glass now cradled in her right hand, absently thinking, before returning her attention to her family.

“Barack?”

The boy looked startled, as if thinking, or _hoping_ , that he had committed a transgression of such magnitude that his family had erased it from memory. No such luck. Lisa thought that with a stab of sympathy. _No such luck._ She had no sympathy for the crime, only for the criminal. Yet she had _so much_ sympathy for the criminal.

“You’re going to have to go to a counsellor or a therapist or someone to have to get to the root of this. Whatever it is. Whyever you feel the need to act out.”

She had a swig of her wine and for a moment did lose control or at least, her eyes did. They had gotten misty-eyed and also feral. A wild look.

“Because we won’t want you to spiral down into a vortex of… whatever motivations you to do those things. Whatever is making you into…” She searched for words. “…a person even you may not recognize. I think you’re confused, Barack. I don’t think the answers are… where you think they are.”

Their mother looked at their father. Only a droplet of the red wine, translucent and jewel-like, lay at the bottom of the glass. Lisa wished she would just drink it. Its existence bothered her. _Go ahead and drink it, mom._

“Your mother is right,” he said in a puppet-like fashion. “I think… I think the election results have affected us all in various ways.”

A storm had begun to build in Lisa, without her knowing it. Her hands gripped the edge of the table. She wanted to shout, to cry out, to scream. She glanced at her friend. _You see, Glimpse. Do you see what we have to live with? Our family?_

“Mom?”

Lisa had spoken without her own permission or volition.  
  
“Mom? Dad? Can we at least… have Barack explain himself?” Lisa’s gaze shifted to Barack. “If you’re okay with that?”

“Lisa!”, said her mother and father at the same time.

But Lisa wouldn’t stop. She wouldn’t. She couldn’t stop. Or, at least, her conscience couldn’t let her do it.  
  
“It’s unfair! I mean… isn’t it right that we…”

“Stop! Stop it!”  
  
They did stop and then they all stared. All of them: mom, dad, Lisa, Glimpse. Barack tried to trash the dining room but his parents and Lisa stopped him. Only later would Lisa realize why he did it. They’d talked about him as if he did not exist, if he couldn’t hear. Like a shadow.

**On the way to the therapist’s — A week later**

“I don’t want to see him,” Barack said.

“It doesn’t matter if you want to go.“ Marge looked at her son. “I’m sorry, but it’s true. Because sometimes we all do things we don’t like to do. The things we don’t want to do can benefit it in the short term. Don’t you agree?”

“Mom…”

“It’ll be just an hour. Okay, less than an hour. That’s like…”

”One twenty-fourth of a day.“

Marge studied Barack, as if he could have had an invisible headset on, so that he could listen to whatever had turned him and if she looked at him right, she could see it. But, then, she thought, her son didn’t need podcasts any more. He had those thoughts inside his head, already. The podcasts would only remind him.

As they walked into the building together, after parking, in their puffy jackets, walking beside her son, Marge felt like an escort taking a prisoner into prison. A prison guard. She couldn’t help that. She couldn’t help playing that role and she couldn’t help thinking of herself that way. Sometimes you had to act, even if it meant taking on a role you didn’t like.

Barack wouldn’t enjoy the experience but he would endure it.

 _Jordan Peterson had it right,_ thought Barack. The Book of Job, which Jordan Peterson so often discussed, had it right. Injustice pervaded the universe, top to bottom. Misery reigned in every dimension of experience. You did not only have to just carry a candle through endless dark. You had to guard the flame of that candle from the winds which could rise and sport and play and extinguish the flame. It could happen at any moment. Barack would bear that candle, even if he didn’t want to.

 **The therapist’s office**

“Call me Marvin,“ said the therapist.

“I don’t want to have to call you anything at all.”

The therapist laughed.

“No, you don’t have to, do you? It’s entirely your decision.”

Barack sat in the seat. He could, if he wanted, ignore the therapist (who had asked him to call him “Miles”) and just look out into the chilly scene.

Barack felt a helpless static rage, gray in color and inexorable, inside him. An angry stiffness. Or something deeper than anger, maybe. It impelled him to do many things, this rage, though he often did not feel it. He ignored it. The voice of that which… well, he could only call it wisdom placated it. It often seethed. In the classroom, when sitting around or just before he fell off to sleep if the gray anger did not prevent him, which sometimes it did.

Once, while bored (a common state of mind for him, when not causing trouble… or learning something that they did not teach in school), Barack had watched a short primer on Artificial Intelligence. AI, for short. An AI program could beat humans at chess or checkers or the Japanese board game Go. No human chess or checkers or Go game player could beat an AI program at any of these games. They simply couldn’t.  
  
An AI program looked at moves and outcomes in order to win. Countless moves and maneuvers, countless ways to win or to lose. It could sort and rapid-compare all of those much faster than a human ever could, because it had, for the program, years of experience, if not centuries. It had no preferences, no opinions, no assumptions. The programs came out grand masters, better than any human, ever.

This therapist, Marvin, knew how to do that, too. He had seen so many kids, as angry as Barack or angrier or more despairing or more confused or more indifferent. More stubborn, even. He could compute all the problems, all the answers. Barack could do nothing. _Nothing._ He had only problems that Miles had probably heard and heard and heard before. The human player against the AI. Barack couldn’t win. He couldn’t even hope to win.

The therapist would break the sandcastle of Barack’s defenses the way the tide would crumble and disintegrate the grandest, finest, more impregnable castle of sand.  
  
Unless Barack made himself so uncooperative, so impossible to work with that the therapist gave up. So he would just sit here and say nothing. Either the therapist would give up now or he would give up later, but he would give up…

Only could not hope to win against the smart AI. You could only refuse to play. 

Just at that moment, just as he came to that realization, a thrashing, exploding thing caused a boom. Something hard and alive and full of fast kinetic energy. Barack’s brain couldn’t process it. It just _existed_.

The impact had no echo on the physical plane. Mentally, though, it did. Barack and the therapist just stared at each other, until Barack realized what had occurred. The therapist, for all Barack knew, did as well.

“A bird,“ said Barack. Got up, said it, thought it. He had done all three things at the same time. He went to the window. to examine it.

The dead bird, in its last fraction of a second of existence, had not fractured the glass but had imprinted it with its body, leaving an oval with a crown around it, indicating the wings. How long would the mark persist? As long as the glass did. It looked kind of like modern art.

Barack had a smile on his face. He sat himself in the chair. He felt sure that Jordan Peterson wouldn’t approve, so his smile fell off and he felt a little sober or guilty. More serious.

“A life ends,” said the therapist. He hadn’t gotten up from his chair. His notepad rested against one knee. The other hand held a pen.

“Yeah,” said Barack. “That’s _deep_.”

“Have you heard of Carl Jung, Barack?”

“Well, _yeah_.”

Of _course_ he had heard of Carl Jung. Jordan Peterson had discussed Jung almost as much as the Book of Job. He admired Jung and said he had learnt from him.

“Good. So you know of Jung’s principle of meaningful coincidence. Sports of chance. _Synchronicities._ “

Sure, Barack thought. He’d heard those terms. Carl Jung had _invented_ the word synchronicity.

“So what does that have to do with anything?”

“It doesn’t. Or it does, depending on whether you choose to attribute meaning to it. Do you choose to attribute meaning to it?”

Barack considered. He really thought. The room, the guy sitting in front of him, all disappeared. A movie would have that “thinking” music come on now. He stopped that and looked at the therapist.

“No. Birds die all the time.”

The therapist had gotten the pen and, with the notepad awkwardly resting on his lap, cradled the pen beneath his chin.

“Barack, I think you know better than that.”

“So what _does_ it mean?“  
  
Barack simply sat, arms folded. It had happened, it had happened. Barack had started to play along. Except he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He wouldn’t give in. He wouldn’t give way. Barack didn’t feel like a hero in not going along, although he would have liked to have done so. He just felt stubborn. Stupidly stubborn. He didn’t budge.  
  
After he sat there, saying nothing, tense and bored at the same time, the therapist called an early end to the session.

“I guess we’re done,” the therapist. Barack glanced towards the impact site of the bird upon the window, the imprint which had not cracked the glass but made an indelible mark upon it.

The therapist stood, which Barack understood as a sign that he, too, should stand, and opened the door into the hall. Barack’s mother sat outside, staring at nothing.

“Mrs. Simpson?”, asked the therapist. “A word in private?"

Barack studied the face of the therapist. It showed nothing, not even disappointment. The therapist and his mother spoke with each other in tones too quiet for him to make out the words. Although, why would he need to do that, when he already knew the substance of the conversation? He stood, waiting for the conversation to end and knowing he had achieved victory, in the battle, if not the war. Why did victory feel so awkward?

**Back home**

Barack and his mother had hardly spoken to each at all. She had put on NPR to cover up the silence. It did not, really. The car pulled up in the driveway.

But the ordeal had not ended. Not even now, past the point when it should have, when the universe should have listened to Barack’s silent cry for mercy, if he made one. He must endure.

After the private discussion, far past the point when the universe should have listened to Barack’s silent cries for mercy. Barack knew the universe didn’t work that way. You put up with injustice. You endured.

After the private discussion, before she and Barack had gotten in the car, Barack’s mother had sent some texts. Standing there, still in his cold weather jacket, Barack watched his mother and father confer, just as his mother had spoken with the therapist. She must have texted Dad outside the office.

The net had closed in. The world appeared to consist only of doors and walls. Doors, sometimes with locks, sometimes with guards or both. No outside.

“Lisa!”, called Barack’s father to the upstairs.

“Just a second, dad!”

Lisa thumped down the stairs. Midway down she stopped for a few moments, as if waiting for another person who no one else could see. Then she joined them in the living room. They all assembled there and seated themselves.

Barack stood, self-conscious of the fact that he hadn’t even taken off his November clothes.

“We’ll wait,” said his father. Barack divested himself of his outer clothes and joined them in the living room. He thought nothing of anything in particular. At last, he seated himself in front of his family.

The faces of his mother, father, sister, every one of them looked serious and old. Even the face of his younger sister. Old.

“So, I’m evil?”, asked Barack. “I’ve turned bad?”

“Barack—”

Either his father or his mother spoke first. It didn’t matter which one. Barack went on.

“Is this an intervention?”

“It’s, uh…”, said his mother, slowly, and looked up at him. “It’s an attempt to rescue you.”

“Rescue me from who? Me?”

“From the ideas you’ve started to believe,” said Barack’s father. “It’s not you. It’s the ideas.”

 _What would that make me_ , thought Barack, _if you take away my ideas?_

Apart from that, they confiscated his laptop and phone. He could use them again, but only under supervision. Nothing he said would ever change that, he knew. Barack felt his sense of self shrinking and contracting into a single point, like a jagged pebble.   
  
Barack, never that great at spelling, had written just seven letters, four syllables. One word.   


_E Q U A L T Y_


End file.
